I had to have a fairly minor surgery last year to repair my badly deviated septum. According to what I read today on several websites, the procedure costs around $10,000 to perform. You might be wondering why I’m researching the price of a surgery I already had instead of just looking at my medical bill. That’s a good question, with an easy answer: I never received a bill. I didn’t pay a dime for an elective surgery that I could have lived without but that greatly improved my quality of life.
I broke my nose pretty severely 20 years ago while I was a young infantryman in the Army. Because I was hardheaded male whose prefrontal cortex hadn’t fully formed yet, I did what might be expected, and just took a deep breath, put my hands on either side of my crushed nose that was pointing a direction it’s not supposed to point, and shoved it more or less back into natural alignment. Problem solved. No downtime for surgery.
However, it turns out there’s all kinds of complicated internal stuff going on in the nose that a few shots of whiskey and an impromptu resetting won’t fix. Weird, right?
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By the time I got out of the Army and into the corporate world, not breathing through my nose and not sleeping more than an hour or so at a time was already old news. It was my baseline, and I was used to it. Occasionally, I would think about getting it fixed, and once I even went to a doctor, who told me it would require about 10 days off work, but I didn’t want to burn my vacation days and sick time for the whole year convalescing with an ice pack on my face while watching bad daytime TV.
But enough about my nose. I want to talk about universal health care.
For some reason I can’t quite explain — perhaps a combination of laziness, misplaced pride and my disillusionment with the system — I didn’t register for VA health care or file disability claims for service-connected injuries until I was almost 40 years old. It took a close veteran friend repeatedly telling me I was an idiot for not doing so that eventually wore down my deeply ingrained resistance to “handouts.” I finally went to the VA, stuck with the process — which is aggravating, I’ll admit — and was given a rating sufficient for free health care and a service connection for my deformed nose, among other old injuries.
I requested an appointment with an ENT, had an MRI done and was referred out to a community care surgeon. A few months later, I went under the knife and have spent the months since kicking myself for not doing it sooner. Turns out, actually being able to take advantage of all this oxygen is pretty cool. Who knew?
I recently told a friend about all of this, and when I mentioned that I didn’t pay out of pocket for my surgery, she said I was “so lucky” to have VA health care. I didn’t tell her that luck didn’t have much to do with deciding to join the Army just as the Global War on Terror was kicking off, because I knew what she meant. And she wasn’t wrong. I feel fortunate that I have access to health care that isn’t tied to my employer. I no longer work at the corporate job I gave 15 years of my life to, and that freedom has allowed me to do the kind of work I actually find satisfying.
The VA health care I receive is government-run, and while I won’t sit here and tell you that it’s perfect or that every veteran has nothing but glowing reviews of it, I will say that after paying in to the scam that is commercial health insurance for almost two decades, this is better. It is truly liberating to not have to work a job you hate for a company that doesn’t care about you just to have the “privilege” of being able to go to the doctor without going bankrupt, or hoping that a for-profit insurance company will approve your claim for a procedure, and if they don’t, either trying to convince yourself the procedure isn’t necessary or trying to figure out if you can possibly pay out of pocket for it. What’s even more insane is that the people who are part of that system are actually the ones who have it “good.” Plenty of Americans don’t have any health insurance at all.
Two friends of mine are currently dealing with health problems. I’m not going to use their names, but their stories say more about this system than any boring statistic I could dig up and cite.
One of these women is a close friend I’ve known for years. She has insurance, and she’s been dealing with a serious autoimmune condition that’s affecting multiple organs. She’s on heavy medication, seeing multiple specialists and enduring a treatment that could last months. She’s not dying, but she’s not OK, either, and the bills are already rolling in. She has insurance — and she’s still getting buried. That’s the version of the health care system that’s supposedly working.
Another friend recently left her job. Her employer cut her health insurance on her last day rather than the end of the month, which was a nice parting gift. Her new coverage doesn’t kick in until next month. During the short gap that she was uninsured, her daughter began experiencing concerning symptoms and needed imaging at a children’s hospital. The hospital didn’t catch that my friend’s insurance had lapsed, so the imaging was approved, and now my friend is waiting on results she’s terrified to receive while knowing that whatever bill comes is entirely on her. She also visited urgent care for an issue, but couldn’t afford the out-of-pocket cost, so she left. Now she’s sick, her child might be very sick, and she’s counting the days until her new insurance kicks in and she’s allowed to see a doctor again.
These aren’t people who made bad decisions or didn’t “work hard enough.” They’re both doing everything right, and the system is still failing them.
Meanwhile, I had a $10,000 surgery and never saw a bill because, 20 years ago, I broke my nose while I was in the Army. The truth is, I didn’t earn my health care any more than my friends failed to earn theirs. Health care should be something you have, not something you earn — a basic service, like public education or the fire department, that we all pay in to because it benefits all of us.
“Let’s ask ourselves why our government can always find money for war and rewarding billionaires, but it can’t make sure a mother can take her sick kid to the doctor without going bankrupt. Why is that where it draws the line on ‘fiscal responsibility’?”
I know I just said that my friends’ stories say more than any boring statistic I could dig up, and that’s true. But I changed my mind, because the statistics aren’t boring so much as they’re staggering, and my friends aren’t outliers.
More than 25 million Americans have no health insurance. None. Another 20 million watched their ACA premiums more than double overnight after Congress let enhanced subsidies expire at the end of last year. Roughly 31 million Americans had to borrow money to pay for health care last year, totaling an estimated $74 billion in medical borrowing. Four in 10 adults are currently carrying some form of medical debt, and half say they couldn’t pay an unexpected $500 medical bill without borrowing money or going into credit card debt.
Most of the people drowning in medical bills aren’t uninsured — they have coverage and pay their premiums. Nearly half of insured adults say it’s still difficult to afford their health care costs, and more than one-third have skipped or postponed care they needed because they couldn’t afford it.
This should be unacceptable to anyone living in the wealthiest country in the world. And according to the Pew Research Center, most Americans agree. Two-thirds of Americans — including 41% of Republicans — say the federal government has a responsibility to make sure all citizens have health care coverage. Only 7% of Americans think the government should have no involvement in health care.
We have a broader consensus on this issue than we do on almost anything in this country, and still, nothing changes because our elected officials keep trotting out the tired line that it’s just too expensive, so we simply can’t afford to make the basic health of our fellow Americans a priority.
However, these same politicians managed to find the money for a war in Iran that nobody asked for — a war that is costing taxpayers roughly a billion dollars a day. Congress hasn’t authorized a dime of it. A majority of Americans oppose it. When pressed on what imminent threat justified starting a war, the White House press secretary told reporters that the president “had a feeling” that Iran was going to attack. The same president who ran as the anti-war candidate, promised to end “forever wars,” and told his base that’s exactly why they should vote for him.
We already spend over $5 trillion a year on health care in this country, more than any nation on earth, and we still can’t manage to cover everyone. However, we can apparently afford a trillion-dollar defense budget for 2026 and the $50 billion more currently being requested on top of that. We can afford billions of dollars to bomb Iran. We can afford $220 million for former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem to shoot campaign-style ads of herself riding a horse in front of Mount Rushmore. We can reportedly afford $300 million for Noem’s luxury jets, including one with a queen-size bed where she and her “special government employee” Corey Lewandowski could allegedly travel the country together in comfort. We can afford for the Pentagon to blow $93 billion in a single month to use up its budget before the fiscal year ended. We can afford Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth allegedly spending $22 million on ribeye steaks and lobster tails.
Let’s stop there and ask ourselves why our government can always find money for war and rewarding billionaires, but it can’t make sure a mother can take her sick kid to the doctor without going bankrupt. Why is that where it draws the line on “fiscal responsibility”?
And it’s not even true that we can’t afford health care for everyone. Twenty-two separate economic analyses have found that a single-payer universal health care system would save money. Even a study funded by the Koch brothers couldn’t avoid the math. Researchers at Yale estimated the savings at over $450 billion a year, and that universal coverage would save roughly 68,000 American lives annually. That’s not some policy abstraction. We’re talking about real people.
In a country where the top 1% controls roughly $55 trillion in assets — a sum roughly equal to the combined wealth of the bottom 90% of Americans — the idea that we can’t afford to take care of each other is a lie. It’s not a disagreement or a difference of opinion. It’s a lie, told by people who benefit from the way things are, repeated by politicians they’ve purchased, and accepted by the rest of us because we’ve heard it so many times we’ve stopped questioning it.
This didn’t start with Trump. The health care system has been broken for decades, and while some in Congress have tried to fix it, the political will has never been there to finish the job. But right now, this administration and so many in Congress have made it clear to me that there’s always room for war, luxury jets and tax cuts for the richest among us. There just isn’t room to fund your trip to the doctor.
I have government-funded health care because I joined the Army when I was 20 years old. I can go to any VA facility or community care provider in the country, get treated, and walk out without ever seeing a bill. My broken nose wasn’t the only thing I had fixed. I’ve had several surgeries over the past few years, most related directly to my service as a combat infantryman during the war in Iraq. It’s taxpayer-funded, and you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who thinks it shouldn’t be. Nobody argues that veterans should have to pay out of pocket for injuries and illnesses they suffered while serving their country.
If we can agree that the government has an obligation to take care of the people who served, why can’t we extend that same basic decency to everyone else? American taxpayers already pay more per person for health care than taxpayers in any other OECD country (and, I suspect, more than any other country on Earth) — including countries that cover everyone. We’re already footing the bill for universal health care. We’re just not getting it. It’s possible, but our leaders just choose not to do it.
I mentioned that I’m grateful for the health care I get through the VA, and I am. But gratitude only goes so far when you’re watching people you care about suffer for no reason other than they didn’t join the military. We should take care of people simply because they are people, and it’s the right thing to do. Point blank.
Instead, 68,000 Americans die every year because they don’t have adequate coverage, and somewhere in the Persian Gulf, we’re currently spending a billion a day on an undeclared, unauthorized war with no clear endgame that started because the president “had a feeling.”
There are a lot of things I wrote in the paragraphs above that we could argue over. However, one thing feels certain to me: In the wealthiest country to ever exist on this planet, whether or not you have to worry about health insurance shouldn’t come down to whether you were willing to get shot at in your 20s.
Nick Allison is a writer based in Austin, Texas. His work has appeared in HuffPost Personal, CounterPunch, The Fulcrum, The Chaos Section and elsewhere. Follow him on Bluesky @nickallison80.bsky.social.
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